In a December 2 tweet that rattled embassies on the other side of the world, President-elect Donald Trump shredded nearly four decades of U.S. diplomatic protocol when he announced he had accepted a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s president. Seen as a public slight to China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province, Trump’s move set off a flurry of international speculation and concern about America’s relationship with China, which boasts one of the most important economies in the world.

The next day, TheNew York Timesheralded the news on the front page: “Trump Muddies China Relations With Taiwan Call.” What was so odd about the article -- yet what’s become such a hallmark of Trump transition coverage to date -- was that the Times was unable to provide any insight into why the president-elect had made such a baffling move. “Mr. Trump's motives in taking the call, which lasted more than 10 minutes, were not clear,” the paper conceded.

The Times didn’t publish a single quote, either on or off the record, from any Trump aides or advisers shedding light on the diplomatic controversy. Instead, the Times was left to quote Trump’s tweets on the topic of Taiwan tweets which, of course, are public and anyone can read.

That’s extraordinary. Yet sadly it’s also become the norm during the one month since Election Day. It wasn’t as if the Trump team, by its own standards, was being unusually secretive about Taiwan. It’s simply been unusually secretive about everything, leaving the press with few avenues of information. (Remember the time, days after the election, when the caught-in-the-dark press corps didn’t know where Trump was?)

Recall the Times’ front page on November 22, when the paper touted as the day’s biggest news offering a newly released YouTube clip from Trump in which he discussed the goals of his first 100 days. There again, locked out from any advisers with insights, reporters were reduced to transcribing the two-and-a-half-minute infomercial and treating it as breaking news (i.e. “Mr. Trump offered what he called an update on his transition”).

Question: Isn’t that more how monarchs and figureheads are covered, not presidents of the United States? I kept asking myself that question last Wednesday when CNN’s daytime coverage for hours revolved around the image of Trump’s plane sitting on a runway in preparation for his trip to Ohio. Is the nation that eager to catch a glimpse of Trump, who lost the popular vote in November and boasts a miserable favorable rating for a newly elected president?

Soon after the election, I warned that if journalists’ game plan in dealing with Trump was wishing and hoping that he’d change, then they’d be doomed, and so would news consumers. One month after the election, the doomsday appears to be looming larger.

And yes, the stakes are that high. “The Trump transition has put in stark relief the very foundations of the profession of journalism in modern America,” writes historian Rick Perlstein.

FromPolitico, here’s a quick reminder about how Trump openly disrespected the press this year, and will likely continue to do so:

He did not allow the press to travel with him on his plane, which meant they were not in his motorcade and often, because of travel snafus, were left behind. He’s banned outlets for months at a time and called out specific reporters he didn’t like. And despite the years of tradition that the White House allows journalists into the building, has them travel with the president in a protective pool and that the press secretary holds a daily briefing, none of that is guaranteed in any sort of law. It is just tradition, and not many believe a Trump White House will keep that going.

And don't forget, Trump hasn't held a press conference since late July.

Instead of Trump’s historic lack of access prompting the press to be even more aggressive and vigilant in its coverage, we seem to be entering Stockholm Syndrome territory, where too many battered journalists seem to think that if they’re nice to Trump and paint him as a success -- as taking on big business and scoring a big Carrier jobs victory -- that he’ll stop bullying them. They hope he’ll grant them access and won’t shred all White House press protocols starting next year.

But that ship has sailed, my friends. The best way for journalists to cover Trump moving forward is to assume they’ll never have any access. That means news organizations can, and should, stop fretting about possibly offending Trump. That opens up possibilities for detailed reporting on his sprawling web of conflicts. (Even if it arrives a bit late.)

And they should stop dancing around the fact that he constantly tells bald-faced lies. When Trump pushed out his fantasy that if it weren’t for “millions” of people who voted “illegally” he would’ve won the popular vote, way too many news outlets simply typed up the assertions without properly stressing that Trump’s claim was categorically false. (Even Trump’s attorneys don’t believe it.)

If the press can’t swiftly and collectively knock down this nonsense, journalists are opening the door to every conceivable crackpot claim in the near future. Is the press really prepared to play he said/he said with Trump and his surrogates about whether the earth is flat, or the moon is made of cheese? Because that’s the direction we’re heading in if Trump’s team is allowed to advance its preferred “post-truth” presidency, where there’s “no such thing” as facts.

Meanwhile, the timid press corps really needs to stop normalizing the outlier and radical nature of Trump’s transition and the people he’s appointing. During the first month of transition coverage, when not erroneously tapping Trump adviser and white nationalist Steven Bannon as a feel-good “populist,” journalists for weeks turned away from the dark, hateful rhetoric of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has been tapped to become Trump’s national security adviser.

One week before Election Day, Flynn, a high-profile Trump surrogate in the press, tweeted out a fake news article claiming Hillary Clinton was linked to “sex crimes with children.” That, of course, is insanely irresponsible behavior for any adult, let alone a retired general, let alone Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor.

But for weeks, while profiling Flynn, the press politely looked away from the specific instance of him hyping a rancid allegation about Clinton. Instead, in long articles about Flynn, news consumers were told about Flynn’s “outspokenness,” his “fiery temperament,” how he throws “sharp elbows,” and isn’t afraid to “ruffle feathers.” Those were some ways that TheWashington Post, CNN, the Times and NPR categorized Flynn’s erratic behavior. Yet none of those profiles mentioned his "sex crimes with children" tweet, which seems like a glaringly obviously example of Flynn's at-times shocking behavior.

Right after the election, the Post’s Margaret Sullivan rightfully urged her colleagues “to keep doing our jobs of truth-telling, challenging power and holding those in power accountable.”

Raise your hand if, over the last four weeks, you’ve been awed by the Beltway media’s tireless drive to hold Trump accountable.

Fox News and much of the conservative media slipped into messiah mode coverage this week when news broke that Carrier, the air conditioner giant, has decided to not move approximately 1,000 manufacturing jobs from Indiana to Mexico as the company had previously planned. President-elect Donald Trump took credit for having negotiated the respite.

Cheering Trump’s hands-on approach and his commitment to the working class, Fox talkers portrayed the Republican’s maneuver in relentlessly glowing terms. “A Big Win For Donald Trump,” announced Bill O’Reilly’s show last night.

Fox’s Stuart Varney claimed Trump had played hardball with Carrier and won: “He strong-armed them. What’s wrong with that?” (According to reports, it was likely the lure of additional tax incentives that convinced Carrier to keep the jobs in Indiana, not being “strong-armed” by Trump.)

Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief Sean Hannity was just gobsmacked by the whole thing, saying on his radio program that he "can't think of a time in my lifetime where a president-elect or a president ever" did this.

Hannity loved the fact that Trump reached out to corporate America, which is fascinating because you know what Hannity didn’t love in 2009? He didn’t love when newly elected President Obama reached out to Detroit’s auto industry in the form of an $80 billion-dollar bailout. Back then, an unhinged Hannity called Obama every name in the book as conservative pundits accused the president of trying to destroy democracy and capitalism.

Fox News and the entire right-wing noise machine relentlessly denounced Obama as he tried to rescue American manufacturing jobs, which the federal bailout eventually did. One independent study estimated the aggressive government move saved 1.5 million jobs. “This peacetime intervention in the private sector by the U.S. government will be viewed as one of the most successful interventions in U.S. economic history," the study’s author wrote.

Lots of people might forget, especially in light of the bailout’s stunning success, but Obama’s push to help the Detroit industry once served as a defining line of GOP attack. The bailout symbolized the dangers of Obama's alleged socialist/gangster leanings. This, despite the fact it was actually President George W. Bush who unveiled the first phase of the bailout plan during the final weeks of his presidency, in order to "avoid a collapse of the U.S. auto industry."

Nonetheless, the topic soon became a cornerstone of the Tea Party and its overheated attacks on Obama, amplified by Fox News.

Remember how Varney this week toasted Trump for having “strong-armed” Carrier? Back in 2009, the host was furious that Obama was allegedly trying strong arm the public into buying American cars: “[N]ow you're in the position where the government somehow has to coerce or force us all into buying the small cars that it insists Detroit puts out." (Varney routinely whined that Obama was a “bully” to business.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck, then with Fox News, claimed the bailout reminded him of "the early days of Adolf Hitler." Fox favorite Michelle Malkin compared the auto deal to a "crap sandwich," and a "lemon" the U.S. taxpayers would be stuck with "for life."

Hannity himself berated Obama for engaging in what he called a "mission to hijack capitalism." And in the infamous words of Rush Limbaugh, it was as if General Motors and Chrysler "bent over and grabbed the ankles." (Limbaugh loves Trump’s Carrier deal, by the way.)

Question: Why would conservatives be so upset about saving American manufacturing jobs? Seems bizarre, right? But they were furious. So wrapped up in hatred for the new Democratic president, conservative pundits despised the government’s attempt to save GM and Chrysler from bankruptcies. They also seemed to despise the companies’ union workers, suggesting they were wildly overpaid. (Pundits even lied about how much the Detroit autoworkers made.)

Republican politicians were also angry. Mitt Romney, who’s reportedly being considered for a cabinet position in Trump’s administration, derided the auto bailout as a "sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan," and guaranteed that if Detroit companies accepted the aid, you could "kiss the American automotive industry goodbye."

In the end, the bailout that Obama championed saved more than one million jobs, and Fox News still hated it.

The process by which the media continue to normalize President-elect Donald Trump and the extreme elements that now define his pending administration is achieved story-by-story, headline-by-headline, and even adjective-by-adjective.

Language, and the way journalists deploy words during the Trump transition, are a central avenue for downplaying and whitewashing what’s now taking place.

Just look at some of the recent in-depth, page-one newspaper profiles of Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart.com executive who Trump has tapped to be his chief strategist and senior counselor. I’m sure much to Bannon’s delight he’s been awarded the “populist” label. But that description is wildly misguided, completely inadequate, and continues a long-running problem of the press mislabeling extreme right-wing movements and politicians as populist. (See: The Tea Party.)

Populism is supposed to represent a running struggle on behalf of regular people against powerful and elite economic forces. Bannon and Trump’s pro-corporate, anti-worker politics pretty much represent the opposite of that.

Plus, “populist” badly downplays the fact Bannon helped run a race-baiting cesspool, while underplaying Bannon’s own alleged history of anti-Semitism.

How best to accurately describe Bannon? Vox did a pretty good job of it: “He’s a leading light of America’s white nationalist movement accused of using misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and barely hidden racist language throughout his professional life.”

How far is that from feel-good “populism”? Very, very far. “Far from populism, this is Revolutionary-era elitism drawn along racist lines,” noted Laurel Raymond at Think Progress.

Yet the problem persists.

New York Times headline, November 27: “Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump.”

It’s true that both the Times and Post articles did explore in detail Bannon’s controversial past and the fringe nature of his unseemly politics. The Times even detailed how Bannon once discussed “genetic superiority” with a business colleague and suggested that maybe only property owners be allowed to vote.

Note that Bannon himself this summer called Breitbart “the platform of the alt-right.” And what is "alt-right" synonymous with? White nationalism. “In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist,” wrote John Daniszewski, the Associated Press’sVice President for Standards, as he outlined to writers how to employ “alt-right” in AP coverage.

The weird part is that this week the Times published an article looking at how news organizations, including the Times, are using the phrase “alt-right” to describe the radical movement Trump and Bannon have become the face of, and whether the relatively new moniker sufficiently captures the movement’s rough and often offensive edges. “The term has attracted widespread criticism among those, particularly on the left, who say it euphemizes and legitimizes the ideologies of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and white supremacy,” the newspaper reported.

So, "alt-right" might not properly convey the outlier politics of people like Bannon, but the Times itself this week published a headline labeling Bannon a “populist.”

Meanwhile, when you thumb through Bannon’s resume it’s nearly impossible to see any threads of “populism” running through it. He is a Harvard Business School graduate who became a Goldman Sachs banker before opening up a boutique investment bank in Beverly Hills, CA, Bannon & Co., which he eventually sold to the French bank, Société Générale. Last decade, Bannon also operated some dubious penny stock ventures, which attracted a number of lawsuits. He has also been a Hollywood movie producer.

After he exited the world of finance, Bannon became the chairman of Breitbart. Under his leadership, the white nationalist echo chamber called for the hoisting of the Confederate flag (“high and proud”), weeks after shootings at a black Charleston, South Carolina, church. It claimed that political correctness “protects Muslim rape culture.” It has referred to conservative writer Bill Kristol as a "renegade Jew." It ran a piece last year encouraging male readers to tell women that "this isn’t going to suck itself."

None of that garbage remotely fits under a breezy umbrella of “populism.”

Of course, the Bannon “populist” coverage flows from the media’s long-running Trump “populist” campaign coverage, which has been ill-advised for more than year. And it continues to this day.

Here are highlights of the likely Trump and Republican Party agenda for next year. Good luck finding lots of “populist” proposals aimed at boosting quality of life for regular Americans:

*Repeal healthcare for 20 million Americans who are insured through Obamacare.

This is all part of the larger Beltway media failure of playing nice with radical right-wing politics under the auspices of populism.

Especially during President Obama’s first term, reporters and pundits spent way too much time portraying the Obama-hating Tea Party movement has a "populist" one, when it most certainly was not. Most “populist” movements, as a rule, don’t passionately defend oil companies, insurance conglomerates, and AIG banking executives. And most “populist” movements don’t compare the president to Adolf Hitler and parade around with swastika posters. They don’t claim the president’s a “racist” who wants to put a spike in the heads of babies. And they usually don’t call for a military coup to overthrow the White House.

But the Tea Party did, and the media rewarded them with the honorary titles of populism.

And now they’re doing it again with Trump and his white nationalist appointments.

New York Times editors and reporters might’ve thought they were going to be congratulated by readers for Sunday’s front-page, six-reporter expose on President-elect Donald Trump’s nearly endless business conflicts. But a chorus of media observers and critics had other ideas.

Rather than applaud the Times for its report, lots of commentators wondered why the newspaper waited until after the election to wave large red flags about Trump’s obvious conflicts, especially when the Times -- and so much of the campaign press -- spent an extraordinary amount of energy obsessing over potential conflicts of interest, and possible ethical lapses, supposedly surrounding Hillary Clinton.

Looking back, there certainly seems to be a perception that the political press didn’t really care about Trump’s looming, impossible-to-miss conflicts or the bad “optics” they might produce. And it appears that the press was overly infatuated with conflict questions about Clinton -- questions today that seem quaint compared to Trump’s far-flung business dealings, which represent a possible gateway to corruption.

That’s not to say the topic wasn’t addressed or that some journalists didn’t tackle it in real time during the campaign season. Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweekproduced a helpful deep dive back in September. And the business press was urgent and upfront in detailing the unprecedented nature of Trump’s looming problem. Bloomberg in June: “Conflicts of Interest? President Trump's Would Be Amazing.”

But in general, the political press seemed less engaged with this issue and appeared reluctant to tag the obvious Trump storyline as a campaign priority. There didn’t seem to be an institutional commitment to pursuing and documenting that storyline, even though the potential problems for Trump were obvious and the story might have disqualified him.

Even today, the story isn’t being treated with the urgency it deserves. Yes, more new organizations are tepidly acknowledging the colossal conflicts and looming inside deals, but so much of the coverage still lacks resolve. Question for journalists: If Clinton arrived at the White House with open and boundless business conflicts, how would you cover that story? What kind of outraged, lecturing tone would you take? Now treat the Trump story the same way.

Newsrooms need to learn from their lackluster campaign coverage and treat the unfolding Trump controversy as a permanent beat inside newsrooms for the next four years. It certainly demands that kind of attention and focus.

Note that aside from the Times’ big Sunday Trump conflict piece, the newspaper also published detailed articles on the topic November 21 and 14, and before the election on November 5. But aside from a few exceptions, in the months prior to Election Day, when voters were assessing the candidates, the intense focus on Trump’s conflicts just wasn’t there. (As Media Matters reported, the same trend played out on network newscasts, which devoted scant time to Trump’s conflicts of interest before the election only to ramp up coverage after Trump’s victory.)

Where was there lots of media campaign interest? (And also lots of bad journalism?) Trying to detail Clinton’s possible conflicts, a storyline forever deemed by the press to be a Very Big Deal.

Recall that the Times and The Washington Post considered potential Clinton conflicts stemming from the family charity to be so pressing that both newspapers entered into unusual exclusive editorial agreements with Peter Schweizer, the partisan Republican author who wrote the Breitbart-backed book Clinton Cash. (The Times also breathlessly hyped the book in its news pages.)

And that was 18 months before Election Day. The topic remained a media priority throughout the campaign.

Clinton Cash, a hodgepodge of innuendo and connect-the-dot allegations, was riddled with errors. U.S. News & World Reportdescribed the book as a "somewhat problematic" look at the Clintons' financial dealings, while Time noted that one of the book’s central claims was "based on little evidence.”

Yet Clinton’s alleged conflicts were considered to be so important inside newsrooms -- and it was deemed so crucial for the Beltway press to suss out every conceivable detail -- that the Times and the Post were willing to make dubious alliances with GOP operatives.

Needless to say, no such partisan unions were formed to report out Trump’s massive business conflicts. Indeed, most news consumers would be hard-pressed to suggest Trump’s obvious business conflicts constituted a centerpiece of his campaign coverage for the previous 18 months.

Meanwhile, recall that lots of media elites demanded Clinton take action before the election in order to eliminate the supposed conflicts surrounding the Clinton Foundation. During August and September, that topic created yet another wave of frenzied Clinton coverage, fueled by the media’s “optics” obsession.

At the time, NBC’s Chuck Todd perfectly summed up the media’s weird pursuit when he announced, “Let’s be clear, this is all innuendo at this point. No pay for play has been proven. No smoking gun has been found.” Todd then quickly added, “But like many of these Clinton scandals, it looks bad.”

There's no question the optics are bad for Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. But no proof has emerged that any official favors -- regulations, government contracts, international deals -- were curried in exchange for donations or pledges.

If she didn’t do anything wrong, why won’t she defend herself? By avoiding taking responsibility, Clinton only exacerbates the perception she is dishonest and untrustworthy, the primary hurdle on her path to the White House. Optics matter when the issue is transparency.

According to the media mantra, Clinton’s possible big-money conflicts looked really, really bad. Reporters hammered the theme for weeks and months, while only occasionally glancing over in the direction of Trump’s concrete conflicts.

Today, coverage of Trump’s conflicts and self-dealing has belatedly arrived. But it often comes with an odd sense of delayed wonder, as if journalists are just now realizing the epic size of the pay-for-play problem at hand for the country, while still hedging their bets.

For instance, the headline for the Post’s November 25 article announced, “Trump’s Presidency, Overseas Business Deals And Relations With Foreign Governments Could All Become Intertwined.”

Could? The president-elect’s business dealing could be a conflict for U.S. foreign policy? That Post framing seems to dramatically underplay what’s currently unfolding. As the Post itself has reported, “Trump has done little to set boundaries between his personal and official business since winning the presidency.”

Indeed, Trump’s refusal to divest himself from a sprawling array of business interests is certain to create an ethical morass that even Republican attorneys insist will produce endless, possibly debilitating, conflicts for Trump.

The media mostly missed this pressing story once during the campaign. They can’t afford to overlook it a second time.

In a strange move that bodes ill for the paper’s future coverage, The New York Times’ public editor devoted her review of the paper’s election work almost entirely to detailing ways in which she thought the paper hadn’t been understanding enough of Donald Trump’s supporters.

Throughout the column, public editor Liz Spayd detailed how readers were upset about the newspaper’s election work and she quoted several of them to prove the point. She stressed that reader outpouring from “around the country” was extremely high (“five times the normal level”), and that there was a “searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects of the coverage.”

But Spayd’s hand-selected readers led inexorably to her point that the Times had not been sufficiently charitable to Trump voters. “Few could deny that if Trump’s more moderate supporters are feeling bruised right now, the blame lies partly with their candidate and his penchant for inflammatory rhetoric,” she wrote. “But the media is at fault too, for turning his remarks into a grim caricature that it applied to those who backed him.” At every turn, the readers with whom Spayd chooses to engage criticize the purported liberalism of the Times’ coverage. The message the public editor sends is clear: the paper should move to the right to quell reader concerns.

Yet not a single reader whom Spayd chose to include in her post-campaign analysis expressed any concern about the daily’s Clinton coverage. Nor did she feature any complaints that the paper’s coverage of Trump may have been insufficiently rigorous. Instead, criticism from the left of the paper’s general election coverage was entirely absent.

The omission and complete lack of introspection is also strange simply because the Times’ treatment of Clinton has been the topic of an ongoing media debate, as a wide array of writers have detailed what they viewed as the paper’s patently unfair treatment of the Democratic nominee. Even the Times’ former executive editor, Jill Abramson, agreed that the newspaper gives Clinton “an unfair” level of scrutiny.

She was hardly alone this campaign, as numerous media observers and readers alike criticized the paper’s treatment of the Democratic nominee, calling the coverage a "biased train wreck" that indicated "a problem covering Hillary Clinton," who was "always going to be presumed guilty of something."

Yet gazing over all of that commentary and all those detailed complaints, Spayd saw no reason to address progressive criticism of the paper. It really does appear that the Times-wide denial is complete.

But so what about the Clinton treatment, some might say. What’s done is done and Trump is the pressing media issue moving forward. I agree. But I also see a direct connection between the Times’ unfair and accusatory Clinton coverage, and what appears to be its increasingly passive reporting on President-elect Trump.

And it stands to reason: If the main lesson the Times newsroom is being taught from the election is that the paper was too tough on Trump, too mean to his supporters, and that readers think the paper’s “liberal” bias is evident, guess what kind of coverage that produces?

It produces the kind of coverage where, one day after Trump’s attorney announced the newly elected president was settling a huge $25 million consumer fraud lawsuit filed against him (an unheard-of development in American politics), the Timespublished a mostly-upbeat, front-page Trump piece that portrayed him as “confident,” “focused,” “proud,” and “freewheeling.” (To date, the Times has published exactly one news article about the Trump University fraud settlement.)

Right below that article on the front page the same day appeared another puff piece, this one an admiring look at Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, described by the Times as a “steadying hand” with “driving confidence” who might serve as a “moderating influence” with Trump. This, just days after Trump appointed a white nationalist as his top advisor.

Meanwhile, the Times’ response to the kerfuffle that recently broke out when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by audience members while attending “Hamilton” on Broadway was oddly passive and defensive. At least two Timesstaffers, including one reporter currently covering Trump for the newsroom, seemed to denounce the boos as being disrespectful. And in its news report on the incident, the Times noted Trump tweeted about the booing, but failed to inform readers that Trump’s tweet was completely inaccurate: Cast members were not “very rude” to Pence. (It was audience members who booed, not the performers, who thanked Pence for attending and asked that he work on behalf of all Americans.)

That’s not to say the Times hasn’t published any worthy news articles during the early stages of the Trump transition. On November 19, the newspaper reported on the morass of looming conflicts for the new president:

President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.

On Monday night, reporters camped outside Trump Tower in New York City were told there would be no more Trump-related news or events that day. Then hours later, they spotted a large caravan of vehicles leaving his residence. Turns out Trump ditched the press and headed out to dinner.

This has already become commonplace since Trump’s election victory: He travels without the press and his team doesn’t always bother informing journalists about his schedule. The situation became so absurd that on Wednesday there were reports Trump had flown, unannounced, to Washington, D.C., which his spokesperson then denied.

By immediately signaling that he has no interest in providing journalists with even the most basic amount of access, and thumbing his nose at the long-standing American tradition of a presidential press pool, Trump has ignited fears about how his administration will deal with reporters, and concerns about whether game-changing restrictions will emerge.

The good news is there are common sense, collective solutions for the looming press crisis. The bad news, based on their performance during the campaign and in the days since Trump’s victory, is there’s little indication news organizations are willing to stand up to Trump’s bullying behavior.

The truth is, nobody knows exactly how the Trump White House will function in terms of dealing with the press. “The operating theory among those of us who have covered him is a Trump White House will be no different than a Trump campaign,” one anonymous reporter toldPolitico.

He seems to be confirming as much. “Trump’s flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday,” the Associated Press recently reported.

Question: Will there even be daily briefings for reporters at the new Republican White House?

As The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone pointed out, there’s no requirement that an administration has to hold briefings and answer questions from journalists on a nearly daily basis. Instead, it’s a tradition. It’s a goodwill gesture in the name of transparency and keeping the public informed.

But if Trump doesn’t have to, why would he? Because you know what else was a long-standing tradition done in the name of transparency? Releasing your tax returns when you ran for president, releasing relevant health information, and answering questions from reporters on the campaign trail during the general election. Trump ignored all of those. He also banned certain news outlets from his events while his campaign herded reporters into restricted press pens at his rallies where he routinely mocked and smeared journalists ("disgusting" and "horrible people”) in front of his fervent supporters.

When Trump gleefully ignored all sorts of media norms on the campaign trail, he was met with modest resistance from the press, and he won the election. So why would he suddenly feel pressure to follow previous White House media traditions?

I’m not trying to belittle the media pushback we’ve seen since Election Day. It’s an important first step. I’m just stressing that journalists could soon be facing an unparalleled effort to silence them. If so, that requires an unprecedented response. Specifically, it demands a sweeping, collective response from the country’s largest, most powerful news organizations.

Because if those outlets are afraid to stand up to President Trump, if they instead try to nibble around the edges and attempt to beg and plead their way toward Trump access, they’re doomed. And so are news consumers.

Meanwhile, Trump has at his disposal an array of dishonest “alt-right” media outlets that will proudly serve as propaganda arms for the federal government. They’ll be willing to help create the illusion of information being released by a Trump White House.

Journalists recognize a crisis may be looming with Trump. But do they comprehend the potential magnitude? Peering over the horizon, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg stressed, “I’ve said it before, but the solution will be what it has always been — good, tough reporting.”

But how do you produce good, tough reporting, for instance, if no senior officials from the Trump White House will return your calls and there are no useful press briefings? And what if the same thing happens with the departments of Treasury, or Education, or Justice? What if there’s a complete and total lockdown on information and denial of access? If the spigot gets turned off, no amount of rah-rah newsroom cheering (“better journalism!”) is going to fix that.

Moving forward, news organizations face a stark, and possibly defining choice in terms of how they respond to any radical efforts to curb the media’s White House access.

First, journalists cannot underestimate what's at stake or the depths to which Trump will go to nullify a free press. (They already made that mistake once in 2016.)

Second, the most obvious fix is to shame Trump into doing the right thing; to use the collective weight of the Fourth Estate to shine a relentless spotlight on what could be the new president’s radical attempt to undercut the free press; to make that a running news story that defines his presidency. Note that earlier this year The Washington Postinstituted a running clock to taunt Hillary Clinton for her lack of media availability on the campaign trail. If Trump cuts off White House access to the press, every major news outlet in America should put up a running clock to highlight that fact.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” --CBS CEO Les Moonves discussing Donald Trump, February 2016.

While reporters and pundits sift through their harassing and sometimes anti-Semitic letters and emails from Trump supporters -- and contemplate what the future holds if radio show host Laura Ingraham becomes the next White House press secretary -- few seem to be in the mood to reflect on their just-concluded campaign effort. And even fewer scribes seem willing to accept that the media made serious missteps in their election coverage -- and that those mistakes helped elect Donald Trump president.

Any implications drawn from the media’s broken performance in 2016, a year when Trump’s former campaign manager was hired by CNNwhile still cashing Trump campaign paychecks, have been largely waved off. Much of the media's message today is that the press simply played no significant role in tipping the election to Trump.

Detailing “The Democratic Coalition’s Epic Fail,” The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall cataloged what he saw as the many shortcomings of the Hillary Clinton campaign. What was notably absent from the list of hurdles that Clinton and Democrats failed to clear? The press. It’s not even worth discussing, apparently.

Immediately following the election, New YorkTimes Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. assured readers that “We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign.” So no, journalists don’t seem interested in self-examination, and they certainly don’t seem open to admitting that their occasionally colossal blunders helped tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

In fact, quite the contrary. “The press succeeded in exposing Trump for what he was. Voters just decided they didn’t care,” Politico announced.

Question: How well did the press succeed in getting Trump to release his tax returns? In getting him to release relevant health information about himself? In getting him to hold a press conference during the final months of the campaign?

Answer: The press failed, categorically, in all those routine pursuits. But many journalists today remain certain everything was fine in 2016.

From CNN reporter Maeve Reston:

He was vetted. And voters chose him. It's so lazy for people to "blame the press" for an outcome they don't agree with.

Reston claims it’s just “lazy” for people to blame the press in the wake of Trump’s victory, but there is solid data to back up a lot of complaints about lopsided election coverage.

As Media Matters pointed out, in the week after FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau would be assessing newly discovered emails to find out if they were relevant to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server, five of the country’s top newspaper published a total of 100 (100!) stories about or mentioning the emails, 46 of them on the front page. Additionally, the three network evening newscasts devoted a total of 25 minutes to the FBI email story during two crucial weeks late in the campaign, compared to just three minutes of policy coverage.

Was the press, in fact, “hostile” to the Clinton campaign? Is Podesta’s point a legitimate one? The answer to that question actually isn’t even in doubt. Study after study demonstrated that Clinton was the recipient of overwhelmingly negative press coverage.

On Twitter, Patrick LaForge, senior editor at The New York Times, suggested it was the FBI that made the Clinton emails such a big issue late in the campaign, and that the paper simply followed the bureau’s lead. But it was Times newsroom bosses, not the FBI director, who decided to run seven front-page email stories in three days late last month while millions of Americans were casting early ballots.

It was Times editors who decided to publish 22 articles mentioning Clinton’s email server in the week after the FBI announcement -- over-the-top coverage that at times looked like man-landing-on-the-moon reporting. Just like it was cable news producers who cultivated a manic, hothouse environment in which the term “email” or “emails” was mentioned thousands of times on air in the days following the FBI’s email announcement.

All of this for a vague statement regarding, at the time, unseen emails that may or may not prove significant to any investigation. (They ended up not being significant.)

What are some of the consequences of the media’s failed campaign coverage? And specifically, its failure to hold Trump to the same transparency and disclosure standard as Clinton?

When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.

Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.

The prospect of the president of the United States becoming deeply entangled in business conflicts while trying to lead the world’s most powerful nation is stunning.

But here’s the thing: Journalists knew that many, many months ago. They all knew that if Trump won the presidency he would be wallowing in unprecedented conflicts of interest and that Americans likely wouldn’t be able to tell where Trump’s foreign policy priorities ended and his business goals began.

The looming conflicts were an open secret. So why did that unprecedented threat to transparency generate so little political press attention before the election?

Short answer: Media were too busy hyperventilating about Clinton’s emails. And that’s when they weren’t utterly devoted to undercutting the landmark Clinton charity by hyping supposed conflicts of interest.

Remember when editorial boards lectured Clinton about the need to banish the family’s charity in order to placate the always lurking optics police?

“Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort.” (The Boston Globe)

“[T]he only way to eliminate the odor surrounding the foundation is to wind it down and put it in mothballs.” (USA Today)

And just like that, the latest Clinton email controversy evaporated on Sunday. FBI Director James Comey announced that recently discovered emails that “appear[ed] to be pertinent” to the bureau's investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server turned out to not be significant enough to alter the bureau’s decision in July that nothing Clinton had done constituted criminal wrongdoing.

For those who have closely followed the email saga for the last 18 months, the FBI’s findings probably weren’t surprising; there’s never been any compelling evidence that Clinton did anything to warrant the type of five-alarm mega-scandal coverage we’ve seen from the media. (See here and here for detailed analysis supporting that conclusion.)

But boy, did the campaign press go all in on the latest email mirage, just like they’ve done every time the Republican Party screams “Clinton scandal!” The press gorged senselessly on the story.

The latest data from television news analyst Andrew Tyndall confirms that broadcast network evening newscasts this year devoted nearly four times as much airtime to covering Hillary Clinton’s emails as they have spent covering all campaign policy initiatives from all candidates for the entire year: 125 minutes for emails, and 35 minutes for in-depth policy discussions on issues like terrorism, immigration, policing.

Specifically in the last two weeks, which include the media's meltdown over Comey’s unprecedented decision to insert the bureau into the election process, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News set aside a total of 25 minutes to cover the emails. That compares to their grand total of three minutes for covering policy during that span.

For the entire year, however, the networks have devoted zero minutes to in-depth policy discussions of climate change, drugs, poverty, guns, infrastructure, social injustice, or the deficit. But they dedicated 125 minutes to Clinton emails.

The updated network evening news numbers continue to spotlight the extraordinary newsroom disconnect that has at times defined this campaign: The press cannot stop covering a D.C. process story, and that obsession is crowding out actual campaign news (important news such as this).

“When Gallup recently asked Americans to say what they recall reading or hearing about her, one word -- 'email' -- drowned out everything else,” according to Gallup’s Lydia Saad and Frank Newport.

The Comey letter was the subject of more than a week of breathless coverage across the cable news channels.

In the nine days following Comey’s announcement, “email” or “emails” was mentioned thousands of times on the three cable news channels, according to TVEyes.

And following Comey’s surprise announcement, five of the country’s largest newspapers also went completely overboard with their email coverage. Media Mattersfound that in the week following’s Comey’s announcement, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post published 100 stories about or mentioning the emails, 46 of which appeared on the front page.

Obviously, the press treated the Comey announcement as an “October surprise,” which meant it was Very Big News -- a “bombshell” and potential game-changer. But note that during the final weekend of the 2000 campaign, during an extremely close race, it was revealed that George W. Bush had previously been arrested for drunk driving and had hidden that fact from voters. The Times ran a single news story that focused on it on page 25. The following day, the Times ran a media piece, on page 14, about how the drunk driving story had been covered and noted that some journalists weren’t sure voters cared about the revelation.

Compare the Times' reserved coverage to the FBI email onslaught and gaze in wide wonder at the double standard that’s been at the center of this campaign season.

Insult to injury? A lot of the email coverage hasn’t even been very good because it has constantly lacked context.

From Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson, who helped oversee a study this year of media campaign coverage:

For example, although Clinton’s email issue was clearly deemed important by the media, relatively few stories provided background to help news consumers make sense of the issue—what harm was caused by her actions, or how common these actions are among elected officials.

While fact-checkers deserve credit for doggedly cataloging Trump’s torrent of casual lies this year, the day-to-day campaign coverage itself, often adrift in mindless narratives and gotcha Clinton fantasies, was at times completely detached from reality. And at the center of that newsroom crisis was the Clinton email saga and the press's decision to essentially treat that one process story as a placeholder for the first female nominee’s entire campaign.

Think about how so much of Clinton’s political resume and her years worth of service were virtually whitewashed during the election season. “Her many accomplishments as first lady, U.S. senator, and secretary of State barely surfaced in the news coverage of her candidacy at any point in the campaign,” noted Harvard’s Patterson: “[I]t has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.”

Why did Clinton receive so little coverage about her past accomplishments and about the policies of her campaign platform? Because the press created an entire news category just for her (“Clinton emails”), which then devoured time and attention, leaving little room for substance.

Over the years, after having watched countless previous Clinton “scandals” evaporate into nothing, I never thought there was much substance to the latest email kerfuffle. Nor did I think the original revelation of her private email server deserved to be treated as a never-ending blockbuster news story. But if the media wanted to cover the story, that’s their right -- and their obligation if they thought it constituted news.

What’s been utterly depressing is the collective decision to relentlessly cover a story that had already been beaten to death nine different times and from every conceivable angle. That and the fact that lazy email mania bumped aside actual, important news that Americans deserve to know about.

We can almost pinpoint the exact moment on Wednesday when Fox News mostly lost interest in the tragic breaking news out of Des Moines, IA, about two police officers who were killed in separate ambush attacks.

Previously, news of ambush attacks on law enforcement was often treated as a top priority at Fox News, which typically shifted into overdrive in not only devoting time and attention to the senseless killings, but also to instantly assigning political blame, with President Obama often starring as the main villain.

Recall that in July, there were two high-profile attacks on law enforcement: one in Dallas, TX, where five officers were killed when a gunman opened fired on a peaceful protest, and one in Baton Rouge, LA, where three officers were killed.

In both instances, the gunmen were black, and in both instances, Fox News worked overtime assigning partisan blame.

At the time, Fox's Tucker Carlson immediately, and falsely, claimed Obama had routinely labeled police “racist” (he never did) and said that the president had created “an environment where something like this is absolutely inevitable.” The rest of the right-wing media piled on as well: Someone must have radicalized the gunmen, the line of thinking went, and that someone was Obama.

The exact same finger-pointing pattern of relentless politicization played out 10 days later in Louisiana. Following the ambush, “conservative media immediately blamed President Obama, claiming that he has added ‘fuel to the flame of racism,’” Media Matters reported.

And when not casting collective blame on Obama, Fox talkers and other right-wing media commentators targeted Black Lives Matter activists for supposedly cultivating ambush shootings -- shootings that had been denounced by Black Lives Matter leaders.

That’s the background. Now back to the deadly news from Iowa on Wednesday. Fox News appeared to lose interest in the story the moment that law enforcement announced that Scott Michael Greene had been arrested and charged with the deaths of the policemen. Fox News' enthusiasm for the breaking news seems to have flagged not only because Greene is a white man who lives in a house with a Trump-Pence sign out front, but also because the gunman is a racist whose behavior had previously gotten him in trouble with the law.

Just weeks before the killings, Greene was removed by officers from a local high school football game after he started waving around a confederate flag in front of a group of African-American fans.

Following the confrontation, Greene posted a YouTube video depicting the altercation, including his run-in with local police officers who demanded that he leave the game. In a comment below his video, Green wrote that he “was offended by the blacks sitting through our anthem. Thousands more whites fought and died for their freedom.”

Note that social justice activists who have recently begun sitting or kneeling through the national anthem have become the target of withering criticism from Fox News hosts and guests. (Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has also attacked activists for their national anthem protests.)

Two years earlier, Greene was also arrested after he allegedly threatened to a kill a man and called him the N-word in the parking lot of a local apartment complex.

In that incident, Greene was accused of approaching a man in the parking lot and shining a flashlight in his eyes.

Greene, who lived in the apartments, called the man the N-word and told the man “I will kill you, (expletive) kill you,” according to the complaint. Greene pleaded guilty to a lesser harassment charge on June 30, 2014, and was sentenced to one year of probation.

So yes, Fox News quickly lost interest in the cop-killing story and covered it only in passing.

Hosting Special Report, Bret Baier gave the ambush story a few sentences on Wednesday night. He provided a skeletal outline and reported that the gunman had “a history of confrontation with police and others.” But Baier didn’t show Greene’s picture, identify him as white, or report on his racist past.

As for the channel’s prime-time lineup of hosts who previously devoted hours and hours to covering ambush police attacks, denouncing the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist organization, and blaming Obama for supporting anti-police rhetoric? Those Fox hosts on Wednesday didn’t care about the Iowa ambush story.

The killings actually join the list of other high-profile police attacks that Fox News has had to look away from, for political reasons.

The Associated Press reported that on June 8, 2014, a "man and a woman ambushed two police officers eating lunch at a Las Vegas restaurant, fatally shooting them at point-blank range before fleeing to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact.” Two months earlier, the killers had traveled to Cliven Bundy's Nevada ranch to join the militia protests against the federal government.

Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity both ignored the cop-killer story the night after it happened; Megyn Kelly devoted four sentences to the ambush attack.

Back on September 16, 2014, "survivalist" Eric Frein shot two Pennsylvania state troopers outside their barracks and then disappeared into the Pocono Mountains for weeks. The shooter had a "long-standing grudge against law enforcement and government in general," according to one law enforcement official. And one friend told CNN that the gunman “was obviously a big critic of the federal government."

Again, Fox feigned interest. As Media Mattersnoted at the time, “In general, Fox has provided almost no commentary, no context, and certainly no collective blame for the [trooper] execution.”

Let’s state the obvious: If a black activist had ambushed and killed two police officers this week, and if it was reported that the gunman had a Hillary-Kaine sign outside his house, Fox News would have to add more hours to the day to fit in all the guttural outrage.

But a white cop killer with racist leanings and an apparent affinity for Trump? Fox doesn’t think that’s news at the height of this campaign season.

With the horse race portion of the Democratic primary contest behind them, party members gathered in Philadelphia last July to nominate Hillary Clinton and to hammer out the party platform. In speech after speech, including detailed primetime addresses by Michelle Obama, President Obama, and of course the nominee herself, Democrats laid out the party’s vision for the future. If ever there was a window of the campaign year when issues and policies were clearly at the forefront, it was the summer convention season.

So, how much of the news coverage from the four weeks surrounding the conventions centered on policy? For Clinton, just four percent, according to a study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

“Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it,” wrote Harvard professor Tom Patterson.

And this is key: During that same summertime period, Trump received three times as much policy coverage as Clinton. Why the large disparity? “A major difference between Trump and Clinton’s coverage was that she had a news category entirely of her own—the emails that she sent and received as secretary of state,” Patterson explained. And as he noted, the vast majority of Clinton email coverage was negative.

So, during the convention weeks, the press spent eight percent of its time covering Clinton emails and half that amount of time covering all of Clinton’s policy positions. CNN’s The Situation Room seemed especially obsessed: Clinton emails represented 17 percent of the program’s Clinton coverage during the four-week summertime span.

Those numbers certainly suggest that the press spends so much time and attention covering Clinton emails that there isn’t room left for policy and issues.

And that imbalance was before the FBI email “bombshell” late last week, which produced an almost comical spasm of media hysteria, punctuated by an avalanche of man-on-the-moon type of coverage. “Email” has been mentioned more than two thousand times on the three cable news channels since last Friday’s FBI announcement, according to TVeyes.com.

“Over the last few days, I've watched the best journalistic minds of my generation devolve into madness, frothing at the mouth over a story that neither they nor the voters they're successfully mis-educating seem to understand,” wrote Will Bunch at Philly.com

And let's be honest, endless email coverage, most of which revolves around pure speculation, is just another excuse not to cover policy.

Last week, I highlighted the shocking revelation from Andrew Tyndall that the three network evening newscasts this year had aired just 32 minutes of in-depth campaign policy reporting. By comparison, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News devoted nearly three times as much coverage to the Clinton email story (100 minutes).

Would serious policy coverage have withered and died this election cycle even without the media’s email obsession? It’s certainly possible. But I think the email fixation quickened the demise.

As I suggested in August, Clinton emails are the new Whitewater. Meaning, it’s a “scandal” in search of a crime and it’s a scandal production staged by Republicans with the eager help of the press. And yes you can substitute “Clinton Foundation” for “emails” and you get pretty much get similar results.

Part of that is because journalists are heavily invested in the emails storyline and have been since March 2015. Journalists want there to be a blockbuster story, just like it seemed clear so many journalists wanted the FBI to “reopen” its investigation last week. (They’re not.)

Part of that stems from a never-ending attempt to criminalize the Clintons. And part of that’s because the campaign press wants more spectacle to cover during the closing days of the election. (Especially anti-Clinton spectacle.)

“The media’s urgency to maintain drama in an election that was increasingly looking like a blowout” made the return of the email storyline “inevitable,” according to professors Matthew Baum and Phil Gussin, writing in TheWashington Post. “A dramatic horse race in which the outcome is uncertain and continually fluctuating is perpetually novel. Additional stories about the candidates’ long-standing policy positions? Not so much.”

Obviously, the campaign press isn’t supposed to be in the business of trying to craft compelling storylines. Yet here we are. And so when journalists feel the need, they just lean on the email storyline.

What gets overlooked in the process? Substance.

“[E]nough is enough,” wrote Isaac Chotiner at Slate, while lamenting the media’s wildly disproportionate email attention. “We are extremely close to the most important American election since God knows when, an election whose reverberations are almost impossible to imagine, let alone measure. Let’s focus on that for a change.”

But sadly it’s too late for this campaign. The press picked its campaign priorities a long time ago and has rarely strayed from that agreed-upon narrative: Clinton = emails. Note that in eight of the ten weeks between July 11 and September 18, “email” was the word most Americans associated with the Clinton campaign coverage, according to Gallup.

The first woman to be nominated by a major party for president is defined, almost completely, by the electronic communication platform she used several years ago while serving as secretary of state. She’s defined by that and by the Republicans’ Ahab-like attempt to turn that story into a career-defining scandal.

Please note that Colin Powell isn’t defined by the private emails he used as secretary of state. (And then deleted.) Jeb Bush isn’t defined by the private email he used as governor of Florida. President George W. Bush’s administration wasn’t defined by the fact that nearly two dozen White House aides used private email accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee. And Mitt Romney wasn’t defined by the fact that his staff wiped away all the emails from the Republican’s years as Massachusetts governor.

It’s only Clinton who gets defined by emails. Because the press, reading off the GOP song sheet, says so. And because the press, alongside the GOP, has been trying to criminalize the Clintons for 20-plus years.

EricBoehlert
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A Senior Fellow for Media Matters, Boehlert is the author of Bloggers On the Bus: How The Internet Changes Politics and the Press, and Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Previously, he wrote on staff for Salon and Rolling Stone.

On December 7, President-elect Donald Trump named Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Media should take note of Pruitt’s climate science denial, his deep ties to the energy industries he will be charged with regulating, and his long record of opposition to EPA efforts to reduce air and water pollution and combat climate change.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked -- or considered -- nearly a dozen people who have worked in right-wing media, including talk radio, right-wing news sites, Fox News, and conservative newspapers, to fill his administration. And Trump himself made weekly guest appearances on Fox for a number of years while his vice president used to host a conservative talk radio show.